Monthly Archives: December 2006

I’m still looking for a programs. First, the blog updater thing. I used Blogjet on windows, is there anything similar on Mac.

I’ve also realized how awesome the mouse gestures in Opera are. Since I love Opera so much, I’m using it on the Macbook and because there aren’t two buttons built in or a right click, there aren’t any mouse gestures. I’m looking for a way to get them back. Is there a program to make custom mouse gestures? I found one the can do mouse gestures, but you have to hold down a hotkey to use them. The whole point of mouse gestures is that you don’t have to use the keyboard at all. Ideally, I want to be able to hold my right hand middle finger down and tap with my index finger to go back, and index down, tap with middle to go forward. That’s really all I need it for.

I felt dirty today. I installed XP via boot camp. It didn’t look right having XP on here.

Anyway, I’m still looking for a good blogging client. I don’t like to log into wordpress.com just to write something here. I’m also looking for a way to have the close button quit the application instead of closing just that window. Last but not least, is there a way to turn off the sleep thing when I close the screen. I only want it to turn off the screen when I close it, not go to sleep.

I also had some trouble with video files tonight. Quicktime wasn’t playing the video properly, but I found Perian and that fixed it. I was also having trouble opening a MPG file. I downloaded VLC and it can play the file so I’m all set now. If I burn a variety of video files as a DVD will iDVD automatically convert them to DVD format or do I have to do that before I burn them?

I still have a few questions though. Does anyone know of a good blogging app or bittorrent client? Can I make the close button exit the program rather than closing the window? I think that’s all Ihave for now.

Other than that everything is awesome. To day I’m gonna try to get Boot Camp on this thing. I need it to run AutoCAD
and Inventor and programs like that for school.

So far I’m getting really good battery life from it too. I got about an hour and a half last night and that only used around half the battery. I’m gonna run it all the way down today and see what it really gets.

This past weekend was rather busy. Saturday was the FIRST Vex competition at the University of Hartford. I didn’t have to work that day so I volunteered at the event. This was the first time I’ve really seen the Vex program. Volunteering in FRC and FLL I thought I should fill the gap and learn more about Vex.

Generally the competition went well. The venue was less than ideal, and the field control had issues but the teams dealt with the situation well and had a good time.

Now that I’ve seen the Vex competition, I think it’s a great step up from FLL and step down from FLL. It provides a great learning base without being intimidating. If a team is run right, I think that the students can learn so much from the program.

After spending all day Saturday at the Vex competition, Sunday was the State FLL competition. I knew that our kids had learned a lot and were prepared for competition. Competition is becoming less intense for me. Now that I’m getting better at teaching, I’m much more confident that the students can handle competition and I let them do just that.

The competition went well and the students did great. We ended up with one team getting the Robust Programming award and the other getting 3rd place Champions Award. We also received $250 from IEEE, which is amazing. I’m especially proud because most of the other teams that wan awards and did well are middle schools. Our kids are younger than a lot of the teams there and do better than many of them.

Overall, it was a great weekend. I’ll be helping out a FIRST robotics team this winter and I’ll have more weekends even busier than this.